Most people don't know this, but Florida has its very own version of Santa. Some know him only by the choking, smog-like mist that shrouds him whenever he appears or by the warm scent of stale Coors Light that wafts through the air when he's especially close. Those who have seen the deity's physical form typically refer to him by one name: Harry the Meth Snake.
Unlike Santa, Harry the Meth Snake, who is made equally of meth and snake, works year-round. He does not deal in physical gifts — instead, Harry the Meth Snake flies from town to town, pumping Floridians full of coke, alcohol, and amphetamines and goading them into doing dumb shit in front of video cameras.
Harry does put in a bit of extra oomph around the holidays, perhaps in a goodnatured competition with Santa Claus. Take, for instance, this year: The Florida gift-giving gods have bestowed upon us not one, but two delicious Miami fistfight videos in a single December day.

It's almost impossible to decide which of these clips better represents the state of Florida.

The first, posted yesterday evening, depicts an employee at a Steve Madden store at Sawgrass Mills walloping a Swiss tourist who demanded to enter a closed store and then dumped a bottle of water on her. The Swiss woman, who quite clearly instigated the fight, then shouts, "I am going to sue youuu!" in an accent so comedically French she could pose as Inspector Clouseau's aunt in a Pink Panther reboot.

Someone was able to rig that account, Morales says, to set up automatic payments to a variety of other accounts at other banks. He describes the city as being a victim of "bank fraud" in the scheme and says SunTrust has already requested the funds back from the other banks.

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How does a city not notice $3.6 million being stolen from its bank accounts? Miami Beach has some splainin to do https://t.co/Az281zqEq1

Saturday, December 17, 2016

If Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine is depressed about Hillary Clinton - who he campaigned for non-stop - losing the election to a spray-tanned, failed mail-order steak salesman, he certainly isn't letting it show it on Facebook or Twitter.

Because in Phil Levine's world, the glass is always half full, the skies are always sunny, and on his Facebook page everything is AMAZING! And Levine apparently - unlike Donald Trump who knows the best words - knows just one word: "amazing."

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out.-David Brooks, New York Times, March 18, 2016

I recalled the paragraph above from David Brooks' March 2016 column as the news filtered out today that Donald Trump told an interviewer that he doesn't need a daily intelligence briefing when he becomes president because, you know, he's smart, really smart.

He also indicated that as president, he would not take the daily intelligence briefing that President Obama and his predecessors have received. Mr. Trump, who has received the briefing sparingly as president-elect, said that it was often repetitive and that he would take it “when I need it.” He said his vice president, Mike Pence, would receive the daily briefing.
“You know, I’m, like, a smart person,” he said. “I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.”
He added that he had instructed the officials who give the briefing: “‘If something should change from this point, immediately call me. I’m available on a one-minute’s notice.’”

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But that's not to say that he won't be briefed in some fashion once he takes office. A Washington Post story from last July revealed that his secretary brings him a pile of printouts every morning that contain news articles about The Donald.

He has no time to read, he said: “I never have. I’m always busy doing a lot. Now I’m more busy, I guess, than ever before.”
Trump’s desk is piled high with magazines, nearly all of them with himself on their covers, (see video above) and each morning, he reviews a pile of printouts of news articles about himself that his secretary delivers to his desk. But there are no shelves of books in his office, no computer on his desk.

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Trump is now complaining about being named Time's "Person of the Year": "Who would rather have it be the Man of the Year?" pic.twitter.com/9Id0zGExbX

Monday, December 05, 2016

Local TV stations spend millions of dollars a year to bring you the news. Or what they like to call "the news." But in fact, the stuff they produce bears almost no resemblance to actual journalism.

A better name for what appears on local TV news these days would be "crime scene porn."

This may be considered "news" by some, but it's not "journalism."(Click image to enlarge)

Those same stations also spend tens of thousands of dollars a month putting helicopters in the air that beam back live pictures of a car chase or a bunch of police cars at a crime scene, red and blue lights flashing.

But there's very little information contained in a shot of a crime scene taken from a camera a thousand feet in the air that helps a viewer better understand the story.

But while most local TV news consists of non-stop coverage of shootings, car crashes and stories showing surveillance videos of convenience store robberies, and more shootings, it's reassuring to know that there are still places you can find real old-fashioned journalism...stories that actually impact your life.

Want proof?

Look no further than Sunday morning's South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Miami Herald for just two stories that didn't require the use of a helicopter.

If Broward Sheriff's Office records are to be believed, a mentally ill jail inmate was alive in his cell 18 hours after he died and another received dinner six hours after he hanged himself.

Documents obtained by the Sun Sentinel raise questions about the accuracy of Sheriff's Office records and how closely some mentally ill inmates were monitored before they died.

Inmate Raleigh Priester died soon after collapsing in his cell about 12:45 p.m. on July 10, 2012. Though he was rushed to the hospital, deputies continued to document, about every 30 minutes and until 8 a.m. the following morning, that he was alive and inside his cell at the North Broward jail.

"I think it's very difficult to explain how several of your employees are claiming that they were checking on somebody at 30-minute intervals when that individual was not in your facility," said Greg Lauer, a Fort Lauderdale attorney who represented Priester's family in a federal lawsuit over his care in jail.

Jessica Rose had the credentials of a rising courtroom star: a lawyer with the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office, an assistant public defender in Jacksonville, a private practice on Clematis Street.

A young attorney brimming with talent and promise, she also struggled with an addiction to drugs, a battle that shattered her career, scarred her family and ultimately took her life.

Randall Jordan-Aparo died weeping and gasping for breath on the concrete floor of his prison isolation cell, naked except for his white boxer shorts.

Incensed that he had cursed at a nurse, guards at Franklin Correctional Institution in the Panhandle fired nine blasts of noxious gas into his 13-by-8 cell through a slot in the door and, ultimately, left him there, sobbing.

“I can’t breathe, I can’t take it no more, please help me,’’ he pleaded.

Five hours later, the 27-year-old was found lifeless, face-down on the bare slab. His mouth and nose were pressed to the bottom of the door, as if trying to gulp fresh air through the thin crack. His hair, legs, toes, torso and mouth were dusted with a faint orange residue, a byproduct of the gas.

They are called to arrest the man who drinks a 98-cent iced tea without paying and capture the customer who joyrides on a motorized shopping cart.

The calls eat up hours of officers’ time. They all start at one place: Walmart.

Law enforcement logged nearly 16,800 calls in one year to Walmarts in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties, according to a Tampa Bay Times analysis. That’s two calls an hour, every hour, every day.

Local Walmarts, on average, generated four times as many calls as nearby Targets, the Times found. Many individual supercenters attracted more calls than the much larger WestShore Plaza mall.

When it comes to calling the cops, Walmart is such an outlier compared with its competitors that experts criticized the corporate giant for shifting too much of its security burden onto taxpayers. Several local law enforcement officers also emphasized that all the hours spent at Walmart cut into how often they can patrol other neighborhoods and prevent other crimes.

“They’re a huge problem in terms of the amount of time that’s spent there,” said Tampa police Officer James Smith, who specializes in retail crime. “We are, as a department, at the mercy of what they want to do.”

Saturday, December 03, 2016

But if you're one of those who also says we should give Trump a chance, here are a few facts.

The day after the election he said, "Now it's time for Americans to bind the wounds of division."

He forgot to mention that it was he who caused the divisiveness in the first place.

But kicking off his "Thank You Tour" in Cincinnati the other day, this happened:

"He sneered at the opponents he had vanquished. He disparaged journalists and invited angry chants from the crowd, grinning broadly at calls of “lock her up” and “build the wall.” He ridiculed the government’s leaders as stupid and dishonest failures."